Reading Exercise:
Freud Quotes
The great question that has never
been answered, and which I have
not yet been able to answer, despite
my thirty years of research into the
feminine soul, is "What does a
woman want?“
Sigmund Freud
Illusions commend themselves to us
because they save us pain and allow us
to enjoy pleasure instead. We must
therefore accept it without complaint
when they sometimes collide with a
bit of reality against which they are
dashed to pieces.
Sigmund Freud
The interpretation of dreams is
the royal road to a knowledge
of the unconscious activities of
the mind.
Sigmund Freud
Civilization began the first
time an angry person cast a
word instead of a rock.
Sigmund Freud
What a distressing contrast there is
between the radiant intelligence of
the child and the feeble mentality
of the average adult.
Sigmund Freud
Most people do not really want
freedom, because freedom involves
responsibility, and most people are
frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud
I have found little that is "good" about
human beings on the whole. In my
experience most of them are trash, no
matter whether they publicly subscribe to
this or that ethical doctrine or to none at
all. That is something that you cannot
say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Sigmund Freud
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear
may convince himself that no mortal
can keep a secret. If his lips are silent,
he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal
oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud
Men are more moral than they
think and far more immoral
than they can imagine.
Sigmund Freud
The act of birth is the first
experience of anxiety, and thus
the source and prototype of the
affect of anxiety.
Sigmund Freud
Words have a magical power. They can
bring either the greatest happiness or
deepest despair; they can transfer
knowledge from teacher to student;
words enable the orator to sway his
audience and dictate its decisions.
Words are capable of arousing the
strongest emotions and prompting all
men's actions.
SIGMUND FREUD
Properly speaking, the unconscious is the
real psychic; its inner nature is just as
unknown to us as the reality of the external
world, and it is just as imperfectly reported
to us through the data of consciousness as
is the external world through the
indications of our sensory organs.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive and will come forth
later in uglier ways.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Religion is an attempt to get control over
the sensory world, in which we are placed,
by means of the wish-world, which we
have developed inside us as a result of
biological and psychological necessities.
But it cannot achieve its end.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Whoever loves becomes humble.
Those who love have, so to speak,
pawned a part of their narcissism.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Religion is a system of wishful illusions
together with a disavowal of reality, such as
we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful
hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh
commandment is "Thou shall not question.”
SIGMUND FREUD
• Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings
us too many pains, disappointments and
impossible tasks. In order to bear it, we
cannot dispense with palliative measures...
There are perhaps three such measures:
powerful deflections, which cause us to make
light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions,
which diminish it; and intoxicating
substances, which make us insensible to it.”
SIGMUND FREUD
• The virtuous man contents himself with
dreaming that which the wicked man does
in actual life.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Human beings are funny. They long to be
with the person they love but refuse to
admit openly. Some are afraid to show even
the slightest sign of affection because of
fear. Fear that their feelings may not be
recognized, or even worst, returned. But
one thing about human beings puzzles me
the most is their conscious effort to be
connected with the object of their affection
even if it kills them slowly within.
SIGMUND FREUD
• When a love-relationship is at its height
there is no room left for any interest in the
environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient
to themselves
SIGMUND FREUD
• The liberty of the individual is no gift of
civilization. It was greatest before there
was any civilization.
SIGMUND FREUD
• As regards intellectual work, it remains
a fact, indeed, that great decisions in
the realm of thought and momentous
discoveries and solutions of problems
are only possible to an individual,
working in solitude.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Words and magic were in the
beginning one and the same thing,
and even today words retain much of
their magical power.
SIGMUND FREUD
• The dream is the liberation of the spirit
from the pressure of external nature, a
detachment of the soul from the fetters
of matter.
SIGMUND FREUD
• What is common in all these dreams is
obvious. They completely satisfy
wishes excited during the day which
remain unrealized. They are simply and
undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Conservatism, however, is too often a
welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to
adapt themselves to fast changing
conditions.
SIGMUND FREUD
• Experience teaches that for most people
there is a limit beyond which their
constitution cannot comply with the
demands of civilization. All who wish to
reach a higher standard than their
constitution will allow, fall victims to
neurosis. It would have been better for
them if they could have remained less
"perfect".
SIGMUND FREUD
• we are threatened with suffering from three
directions: from our body, which is
doomed to decay..., from the external
world which may rage against us with
overwhelming and merciless force of
destruction, and finally from our relations
with other men... This last source is
perhaps more painful to use than any
other.
SIGMUND FREUD
• The dream shows how recollections of
one’s everyday life can be worked into a
structure where one person can be
substituted for another, where
unacknowledged feelings like envy and
guilt can find expression, where ideas can
be linked by verbal similarities, and
where the laws of logic can be suspended.
SIGMUND FREUD